


Step on a Crack

by AntivanCrafts



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: I Just work here, M/M, is this a ghost story or a reincarnation story who the fuck knows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 03:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10631670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntivanCrafts/pseuds/AntivanCrafts
Summary: Six months after the geostigma crisis, Reno returns home to find Yazoo waiting for him, along with a whole host of unanswered questions.





	1. Chapter 1

In hindsight, he supposed he shouldn't have been surprised to return to his shitty apartment one night to find Yazoo waiting for him. It had been that sort of day. Year. Life. Sure, Yazoo had died, as much as someone who had been created from the will of a dead man could be said to have really been alive in the first place (which was a hell of a lot, if Reno were to be completely honest with himself, which he tended to avoid, as a rule) but considering his social circle? The only true surprise was that it had taken as long as it had.

  
Reno became aware that he had been staring, trying to summon up some amount of the anger and betrayal he'd held tight to his chest these past months, but when he looked, all that he found was a flickering spark of something that made his lip curl. He gave a laugh that sounded odd to his ears and averted his eyes as he fished in his pocket for his lighter. Gave him an excuse to look anywhere but at the slow, spreading smile waiting for him on the other side of the room.

Yazoo had made himself at home on the edge of Reno’s kitchen table. Perched, really, if he had to come up with a word for it, something about the tilt of Yazoo’s hand through the air as it came to rest beneath his chin putting him in mind of a bird. Not a domestic one, all clipped wings and directionless instincts, but a raptor. Something with sharp claws and heavy, watchful eyes. Reno didn't look to see if Yazoo’s eyes had changed. Wasn't sure if he would like the answer, either way.

Yazoo broke the silence first, hopping down from the table with a rustle of heavy fabric. “You've let yourself go, sparkplug,” he said with a smile that wasn't half so self assured as it had used to be. It was quieter, and Yazoo had been pretty damn quiet to start with. Too quiet, sometimes, but other times...

Reno raised his eyebrows wordlessly. He had plenty of things to say, had been building them up with every passing day, counting them every night, but now that Yazoo was here and alive to hear them, every single one wasn't enough. He shrugged. “And you've grown a second asshole,” he said easily. “Might want to look into that.” That wasn't what he'd wanted to say at all, but it was almost worth it just to see an actual expression settle across the serene angles of Yazoo’s face.

In this case it was irritation, there and gone, but lingered in the pull of Yazoo’s mouth and in the tight clench of Reno’s fingers on the cigarette. “It was an observation,” Yazoo said after a long moment had dropped by, slow and shivering on the descent. Turned his head and followed after it, tracing the perimeter of the small room. Now that someone else, and this particular someone, was standing in it, Reno experienced a brief moment of embarrassment, or something like it. He wasn't wrong. Reno had let himself go, but not in the ways people usually meant it. “You are too sensitive.”

Reno made a rude sound, and Yazoo thankfully turned away from his inspection of a fist-shaped hole in the wall. His hands sketched a smile in that quiet way Yazoo had always had, showing his emotions plain as day, for anyone who was willing to look. And Reno had done a lot of looking.

“Six months, and that's all you got? You don't know why you do anything, do you?” It came out sharp, but not sharp enough. Yazoo laughed, his eyes crinkling in a genuine smile, and something hot twisted in Reno’s gut, made him say, “I heard about what your brother said. None of you did, you just-” He waved a hand vaguely, but his expression was anything but uncertain. In this moment, he wanted Yazoo to hurt, like he had.

He wasn't sure if the expression that chased itself across Yazoo’s face and settled into the corner of his mouth felt like a victory or just one more defeat. “And you do?”

“You're just going to disappear again.” It had sounded a lot less unsteady in his head, and Reno jerked his head away towards the line of empty bottles stacked up by the sink. They were waiting to be recycled by no one at all. He glared at them, unseeing, as Yazoo moved behind him. He shouldn't let someone get in his blind spot, much less this someone, but Yazoo had always managed to work his way into places he shouldn't.

Yazoo didn't respond at first, for long enough that Reno thought he wasn't going to answer at all, before he said, “Everyone disappears.”

“That's a load of shit.” Reno hissed from between his teeth. Any louder and it would have come out pained, and he was damned if he was going to let that happen. “What happened to wanting to live? Being desperate enough that you'd turn a summon on children?” He looked up. That was a mistake. Yazoo was closer than he had any right to be. Reno sucked in an unsteady breath, resenting how his control was bleeding away faster than, well, a lot of things he could have named.

“Desperation, you say.” Yazoo’s voice was quiet. Thoughtful. He lifted a gloved hand that hovered just shy of touching Reno’s cheek. Reno refused to look at it. This close, he could finally see Yazoo’s eyes, couldn't see anything else. They glowed faintly in the dark, reflecting what scant light there was, flat slits of green that made his mouth dry out. “Are you so sure it is me you are angry with?”

“Stop trying to psychoanalyze me,” Reno snapped, jerking away from Yazoo to stalk over to the window. “I asked a question, I want an answer. Deserve an answer.”

“It isn't about what we deserve,” Yazoo said to his back, but relented. “I died,” he said, softer, barely a breath at all. “Do you know what it's like, returning to the lifestream?” He didn't give Reno time to answer. “It hurts. It is euphoric. It is every sensation all at once, and then nothing. Because you are dead. Because, to the planet, you weren't alive at all. You were a mistake, and now you are gone, worse than gone…” He made a noise halfway between a snarl and something worse, something that cut. “You were never there to begin with.”

“You saying you aren't angry?” Reno was talking on automatic, his hands clenching tight on the cracked and flaking tile counter. Grit was working its way beneath his nails, and he didn't care, didn't care, because sitting here, talking about deaths of all kinds with a dead man, was the most alive he had felt in too long. “You've got Sephiroth on one side, telling you you're worthless, and Gaia, actual mothe-”

“She's not my mother,” Yazoo said sharply. Reno still did not turn around, though his back itched with the weight of Yazoo’s eyes.

“Yeah? You saying Jenova is? Cause we all know how that turned out, and spoilers, it ends with death and dying and the lifestream all over again, except this time I think it'd burn you out, like a virus. How could it allow something like you in it?” He was talking fast, too fast, and he only remembered to suck in a breath, another, when a gloved hand settled beside his on the counter. Not quite touching, but close enough he could, if he just twitched his finger to the side a bare inch. He didn't.

“The same way you are allowed to remain here in your city,” Yazoo said, without any heat. Reno’s face twisted regardless, hearing unsaid words that he'd thought about himself often enough before. “I have my uses, and so do you.”

“And that's all I have to look forward to?” Reno asked, turning at last to grip a white knuckled hand in Yazoo’s coat. “Being useful?” _What if I want more than that?_ He thought but didn't say, and maybe this time Yazoo heard the words he didn't say, too, because Yazoo’s catlike eyes flickered up to meet his just long enough for Reno to catch like fear in them, before Yazoo closed the distance between them and pressed their mouths together.

It was awkward in a way Yazoo very rarely was and that Reno very rarely wasn't, all mismatched angles and too much teeth, but Reno drank it in like a man dying of thirst. Yanked Yazoo closer to grab at his coat and hair and skin, anything and everything he could reach because he felt he might fly apart at the sean's if he didn't. And maybe he did. Maybe he had been all along, and this was the final dream before the pain and the joy. Or nothing at all.

Either way, if the taste of Yazoo’s smile on his tongue was the last, first thing he'd leave this world with, well. He knew there were worse ways to go. 


	2. Chapter 2

Reno tried not to make his discomfort obvious as things settled into something like normalcy, or as close to it as the two of them could get. He couldn't describe what he was feeling about this at gunpoint, but it was hard to ignore the twist in his gut whenever Yazoo left the apartment for hours or even days, as he tended to do. Yazoo never told him where we went, and Reno never asked. Anything he had to say about it got lost in the shuffle. Not like he had any right to complain except, whispered a voice, when he did.

  
Reno told that voice to stuff a cork in it and turned his attention towards his work and away from silver haired pretty boys who took up too much air when they stood next to you.

Yazoo seemed to perhaps be experiencing things he hadn't the last time around, or maybe he was just showing them easier than he had previously. Reno was undecided, but looking at Yazoo now where he sat on the window ledge leading out onto the fire escape, watching smoke and smog gather beneath the plate overhead, he wondered if he really did have a place in it. If Yazoo had chosen to come here not because there was even the slightest touch of attachment for Reno, but because Yazoo knew that Reno would tolerate him where few others would.

...And that right there was another tripwire in his head.

“How can you even stand living in this city?” Yazoo asked him without turning around, startling Reno out of his thoughts. There was a clear frown in his voice, but no anger. “I feel claustrophobic staying here for one day, let alone a lifetime.”

There were a lot of things Reno could say about being trapped, both financially and emotionally, but they were too on-the-nose for comfort. Instead, he leaned against the wall beside Yazoo and lit up a cigarette without asking if Yazoo minded. It was still his damn apartment, even when there was a whiny ghost haunting him rather more literally these days. “No one’s keeping you here,” he said towards the ceiling. “If you want to leave so much, the door’s over there.” It came out with an edge, and he wouldn't have blamed Yazoo for snapping back. Wanted him to. Instead, Yazoo leaned his his head back against the side of the windowsill and stole his cigarette. Reno hadn't expected that, and was so surprised he let it happen. Then, watching Yazoo’s mouth curve in a smile around the cigarette put him in mind of other, older days, and he snapped his gaze back up to the ceiling.

“I am relearning what it is like to be myself. Or learning for the first time,” Yazoo said mildly, lifting the cigarette out of his mouth to blow a smoke ring, and when had he learned how to do that? “I thought you might be interested in the process.”

He was, but he either wanted to be privy to all of it or none of it, not this bastardized mix where he felt like an intruder in the one place that was supposed to be uniquely his. And he resented that it being otherwise made his stomach twist into knots, that now that he knew Yazoo was around, he wanted… what did he want? Closure? He scoffed aloud at himself and turned away, choosing to let Yazoo keep that cigarette in favor of reaching for a bottle.

He felt the itch of eyes on him, but when he turned around, Yazoo was looking back out over the slums. “Go ahead then,” he said after a few awkward seconds. He was tired and on edge, and had had enough, frankly, of tiptoeing around the edges of this conversation, afraid of pushing Yazoo towards one side or the other. He was tired of a lot of things. “Say what you want to say. Holding it in will give you cancer.”

“Like these?” Yazoo asked, toying with the cigarette before he closed his fingers around it, crushing it into a gnarled mass of paper and chemicals, and flicked it between the fire escape’s grating. “I've always had an interest in these. Every inhale is a tally mark against your future. One hour or day taken away from your future.”

“Future me is a prick,” Reno snorted. “That guy deserves what he gets.”

Yazoo hummed noncommittally, which just pissed him off more. He wanted Yazoo to do something, anything, other than flit through his life without touching him. Kissing him, the way he had a few scant weeks ago. Yazoo had shown no sign of doing it again, and Reno wasn't going to ask. He didn't want to have to. His whole life had been spent on an uphill battle for what he wanted and should have had given to him, and he wasn't about to beg. Not from Yazoo, not from anybody. Not anymore.

Even thinking about it made him shift his weight back and forth from foot to foot as he opened his half forgotten bottle of scotch and took a swig directly from the bottle without tasting it. It didn't kill the tightness in his chest. Actually made it worse. He grimaced as Yazoo moved behind him, and turned his head to see that Yazoo had crossed towards the door. “Found the door, did you,” he grunted, already trying to distance himself from Yazoo’s leaving, again, knowing that each time he did might be the time he didn't come back. Had to be better places to waste his time than a washed up turk’s hole in the wall apartment.

“I need space,” was all the answer he was apparently going to get.

Reno rolled his eyes and let the bottle drop to hang at his side as he turned around, then he stopped. Yazoo had undone the top half of his coat and slid his arms out of the sleeves to let it pool around his waist. Reno would have commented, but Yazoo’s back was toward him, and the muscles in his back were. Twitching.

Reno narrowed his eyes. Was he trying to-

Something shivered along Yazoo’s shoulder blade, but whatever he'd intended to happen wasn't happening. A lone feather drifted to the floor and was forgotten. Yazoo stood shivering, tense as a harp string, for several seconds before he slumped. “It didn't work,” Yazoo muttered.

“Unless you were trying to look like an invisible hooker was sucking you off, yeah, it didn't.”

Yazoo sighed. When he turned around, the expression on his face made Reno swallow back acid building up in the back of his throat. “I wanted to see if I had… diminished after my return. It seems I have.”

“That, or gotten a bigger head,” Reno said into the mouth of the bottle. This time, when Yazoo looked at him, it was almost like he was looking at Reno for the first time.

“Come with me,” Yazoo said abruptly, turning to climb out onto the fire escape. He didn't have any particularly convincing reason not to follow except for spite, which was a hell of a motivator, but by the time Yazoo had disappeared from sight, Reno was already in motion to climb out after him.

Yazoo had started up the stairs towards the roof, taking them two at a time. Reno followed more sedately. When he got to the roof, he found Yazoo rearranging a pair of foldable camp chairs closer to a rooftop garden that Reno hadn't even known was there. This being Midgar, they were weak and sickly looking but alive, which was more than could be said for how they'd have fared even a year ago. “Did you put all of this up here?” Reno stepped closer, peering at what looked like seashells scattered in the dirt.

“Yes.” Yazoo was watching him. He didn't dignify it by looking back, but he did take another swig of his drink before he threw himself into one of the chairs, wriggling around until one long leg was flung sideways over one of the arms of the chair. “I assume you have thoughts to share.”

“You'd have been better off doing literally anything else than a garden, but hey, it's your gil.” Was this where Yazoo spent his time when he wasn't at the apartment? Couldn't be, there were a lot more exciting places for a newly born pompous jerk to spend his time than on the roof trying to coax life where it wasn't ever meant to be, but the idea gave him pause.

Yazoo was quiet. Reno let it drag on for a little while before he let his head loll over to look at him. Yazoo was crouched on the side of one of the planters, reaching out to run a gloved hand across a yellowed leaf in a way that put Reno in kind of someone else. He looked away. “I did not have the chance to grow myself,” Yazoo told him, or maybe nobody. “I wanted to see what it would be like.”

It looked like a failure to him, Reno thought sourly, but he relented, pushing himself out of the chair to the flower bed. “You're overwatering them,” Reno said after one look at the plants. He’d never taken it up himself, but too much time spent around somebody whose only hobby was gardening made you pick up a few things. “Stop fussing over them, you're gonna kill them.”

He could feel Yazoo frown. “And… what do you suggest, for when you still want a thing to grow?” They weren't talking about plants anymore. Reno sighed and took another drink.

“I don't. You do whatever you have in mind. I'm certainly not going to change your mind, am I?”

There was another silence, shorter this time, and then Yazoo broke it with a single, short laugh. “Probably not,” he admitted, which was more than Reno had expected, but less than he wanted. “But having it said aloud would be helpful.”

“So say it, then. I only do all the work if you're really pretty.”

That earned a snort. “I'm not used to this,” Yazoo said. “Feelings. And before you can say it,” he interrupted before Reno had finished opening his mouth, “that wasn't an invitation to mock me. I simply meant that positive things had been… muted, before. Anger and hate and the thrill of violence were there, but the rest were…” He shrugged, rather helplessly. It looked like saying this was taking a lot out of him, and Reno wasn't sure how he was supposed to react.

“You seemed to like sex pretty good last time,” he commented, which earned him a more genuine laugh, which was different from how it had always sounded before. Here, now, it was softer, and not directed at anyone but, maybe, himself.

“I'm not saying I was an unfeeling robot, Reno,” Yazoo said patiently, throwing back his head to throw him some sort of expression, but Reno was more focused on hearing his name come out of that mouth. “You have trouble enough with happiness yourself, if I'm any judge.”

“We’re not talking about that.”

“I think maybe we should,” Yazoo said right back, and the ass was watching him again. It made him feel both too small and far, far too big.

“ _We_ shouldn't do anything. _I_ am going back inside, and you can frolic with your weeds if you want,” Reno said sharply. He turned on his heel to go back inside, but stopped, brought up short by a hand at the bend of his elbow. He looked down at it, then back at Yazoo, who drew his hand back like he'd been burned.

“You're going to tell me what you want,” Reno told him, “and then I'm going to tell you how it's going to go. But not right now. Right now, I am going to make sweet, sweet love to this bottle and then the one after that. Consider this the sock on the doorknob.” He turned his back on the twist of Yazoo’s mouth and started back down the stairs, but all he could think of was how much he'd wanted to stay. 


	3. Chapter 3

"He was scared."

It was the first thing Yazoo said to him since returning to the main floor of the apartment an hour ago. If Reno had to be honest with himself, he'd been sulking, but he'd prefer to think it was waiting for Yazoo to fill in the quiet. It was a long since accepted interrogation technique of the Turks. Silence made people nervous, and they wanted to fill it. Problem was, it wasn't working on the right person. "You know," Reno drawled, lowering the lip of his bottle to eye Yazoo sidelong, "talking to yourself in third person isn't a great sign, dustbunny."

Yazoo made a soft noise he couldn't quite decipher and crossed the room, then back the other way. Lightly. Too light, for Reno's comfort. It would've been hard to tell where he was, if he hadn't been looking right at him. "People forget that. He forgot that."

"Sephiroth, you mean? Get real," Reno huffed, crossing his arms across his chest (defensively, that trained, analytical part of his mind that was difficult to turn off told him) and feet as he leaned against the entryway to the kitchen, a picture at odd angles. 

Yazoo wasn't looking at him. He was looking back out the window. He stretched his hand up and out, towards the few shards of withered sunlight seeping through the cracks in the plate. Reno glanced back at his face. He'd expected him to be utterly expressionless, the way he had often been, before, but now there was something pained lurking in the downward turn of his mouth. A shutter to his eyes that kept Reno out, the way they always had.

Both of them looked away.

"I have all of these memories," Yazoo said quietly into a silence that seemed to suck all of the air out of the room. "People. Places." There was a soft creak of leather. Reno didn't look. "Feelings." Another creak, a rustle of fabric across wood, and then Yazoo was standing right behind him. He would feel it in the rise of the hairs on the back of his neck. If he turned around, he could touch him, but he didn't. "He had been someone, before mother."

"She isn't your-"

"Crooked smiles," Yazoo said without the slightest pause, as if he hadn't spoken at all, "careful hands, eyes the color of glass that went on forever. The legends forget he was _brilliant_ , like his father. It is sad. No one cares."

"It isn't _sad_ ," Reno snarled, and he wasn't angry about this, about Sephiroth, not really, but something in the way Reno wasn't looking at him but his body was, his hands and shoulders and feet pointed at him, all quivering, like he wasn't sure if he wanted to fly at him or away, and why- "He was a-"

"Monster." Reno snapped his head away at a sudden crash. Liquid tracked down the wall, towards a ruin of glass and paper. His hand, Reno was surprised to see, was empty of the bottle he'd been holding. Stumbling, he started towards it, guilt twisting heavy in his mouth with the vague idea of cleaning it up, to do something, anything, to shut Yazoo up-

"That's what you were going to say. Monster." It was Yazoo's voice, though he refused to look up to see where he was, refused to look up from the shaking of his hands in the smear of brown and red. "Noun. One who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character. A threatening force. Reno," he said again, and when Reno looked up, Yazoo was a too bright figure slashed across burning eyes. "Are you human?"

Reno stared, unseeing, at the shape of his hands. He didn't say anything. Should have. There were words he could say, should say, but he couldn't find them. Yazoo knew them anyway. "Who remembers that, Reno? Who cares?" Those soft, gentle words felt like Yazoo had hollowed out his chest with those soft, gentle hands and packed him full of snow. And now it was melting, running down the empty hollow of his stomach in a torrent that made his eyes drop down with the weight of things he didn't, couldn't, say. "Why are you really in this apartment, Reno. Who keeps you here, night after night, when all those you called friend are gone from here?"

Reno snapped his eyes up, intent on snarling something sharp as the glass embedded in his hands, but Yazoo was far closer than he'd expected, looking at him with that infuriating expression Elena and Rude always had when they looked at him these days, like he was going to fucking _break_ -

He didn't realize he'd said at least part of that aloud until Yazoo moved again, settling back to crouch on his heels. "If you're trapped here," Yazoo said, "then so am I. I want to find the same thing you do."

"There isn't anything to find," Reno snarled finally, his voice a thick and rasping thing. "There isn't some grand life lesson to learn from watching me find my death at the bottom of a bottle. They know that, why don't you?"

Yazoo's mouth parted, or Yazoo thought it did. His eyes were burning like his hands, and he turned away to scrub again at the floor with what turned out to be his dress jacket. "No one cares about the backstory," Reno said into this new, second silence. It was just as heavy as the first, but tasted different. More sour. Like salt and metal. "They care about gil. About paying your way back into their good graces, and I ain't. I won't," he added, corrected slang that still clung from a lifetime in the slums that came too easy these days. "I won't beg. Not again."

"Is that what they want?" It sounded honestly curious, but Reno wasn't fooled.

"Of _course_ it is," he said. "Everyone needs to win. To feel like they got theirs, and," he laughed, harsh as his growl but it tore on the way out the way the latter never had, "they can take it from my dead body."

"So its spite, then," Yazoo said. He'd tilted his head, watching him out of first one eye, then the other. Had he always done that?

"What? Who- No." Reno shook his head. Everything was getting muddled, and irritation was warring with a bone deep weariness that made him wish for a bottle or his couch or a warm pair of arms, or a combination of all of the above. Somehow, and later he wouldn't quite remember how, he was up on his feet and turned towards Yazoo, because if Yazoo wasn't going to leave, wasn't going to stop haunting him like a godamn ghost, he could at least chase away this chill in his chest...

But Yazoo stepped back, swift, and touched two gloved fingers to a startled Reno's lips. "If you're going to kiss me," Yazoo said, with the strangest expression he had ever seen on his face, "I don't want it to taste like blood. Not this time."

"You're aching after the wrong alley cat, then," Yazoo snapped back, but it lacked heat. Was almost a question. 

"If I'm aching," was the only answer he got, "its not for that." And with that, Yazoo turned and started through the kitchen, in the direction of the door. A thrill of triumph at his victory was doused immediately with that chill come back all over again, until Yazoo came back with a first aid kit. "Or that," Yazoo said, with another one of those strange noises that he slowly realized was a laugh. A chuckle, quiet and muffled between his lips, like a secret. "If I wanted you dead, I would have gone out and found another four bottles where that came from."

"I'm not that bad." Reno scrunched up his nose, but watched through half lidded eyes as Yazoo removed impressively large shards of glass from his hands and cleaned and dressed them. 

"You're worse. Now get up."

"Where are we going? The window? I thought you said you didn't want me dead."

That earned him a sigh. Reno was learning to take a quiet delight in earning those. "Bed." Then, off Reno's wiggling eyebrows, "Shut." The words could have been mistaken for bland, emotionless, but Reno did not make that mistake. It was laughing, pinched between those lips Reno remembered as being warm as the blood Yazoo had cleaned from his fingertips. 

He was knocked out of his daze when Yazoo pushed him just slightly, enough to knock him off balance and onto the couch. Reno ordinarily would have used any one of half a dozen lines just then, but he was dizzied for any number of reasons, and one of them was remembering the look in Yazoo's eyes when he'd said the word 'monster.' Lost in thought as he was, he didn't even notice when Yazoo left. He never did.


	4. Chapter 4

The apartment was starting to feel claustrophobic. Not like the walls were closing in, nothing so cliche as that, as if anything about him had ever been so simple or so complicated as that. No, it felt like the vents were broken, circulating bad air that made it hard to catch a breath, or five. He'd tried stubbing out his cigarette and opening up the window to stick his head out and suck in a deep lungful of air, but all he got was a rush of smells from a dozen nearby stalls and and houses and lives that was hot and heavy and nearly made him gag.

He was hyperventilating. Panicking. He knew that much, knew it down deep in the way training stuck, like meat in between a bad tooth, no matter how you tried to wiggle it free. And just like that bad tooth, that bad air, he kept circling around to the things that hurt.

Not his hand. He didn't give two shits about that, hadn't since he'd woken up to find it neatly wrapped and bandaged (and when had Yazoo learned that, he wondered). Physical pains didn't bother him. In fact, seeing as they gave him something real to focus on in these days filled with uncertainty, being able to clutch his fingers tight around the throb in his palm felt almost right.

The dull pain was a comfort, a reminder that some things were consistent. Reliable. You didn't question pain, you just rode it out or transferred it any way you could. That was it. Your only two options. And he had long since accepted that, had come to see an odd comfort in that sturdy rock of reality, until in came flying an angel with broken feathers to shake up that sturdy, reliable reality.

Pain was to be questioned. Death was not as solid as it had used to be. And, finally, he thought with a downward twist to his mouth that was half sneer and half a rictus grin locked in a grimace, plants, greenery, did not mean her. Not anymore. He'd taken over that, too, in that slow, insidious way he had tainted everything Reno had.

He couldn't remember when that had last not been the case, but things had slipslided their way towards a downward slope ever since, leading him straight to Yazoo and his fucking half mast eyes.

Reno reached without looking for another bottle and found it empty. They all were, but he was finding it harder and harder to muster up the will to leave. This apartment had become his whole world, over these past months, and more and more he found he had a growing reluctance to expose himself in the way it would take to walk among Midgar’s people again. Take the risk of seeing familiar faces. Looking at them and knowing they could see him for what he was.

 _And what was that?_ Came the thought, unbidden, followed by, _monster_.

He'd never thought that, not so clearly. Not defined by words made of electric lights and barbed wire so that it burned to the touch, but. It was true. In these past few days and weeks, watching Yazoo tentatively grow and explore his humanity, he was starting to question who'd been the monster in the first place.

He'd never really done that before. He had his reasons for what he did, and didn't begrudge himself of them, not usually. But even a monster had his place, his lair, his kin, and he'd thrown that all away. He had nothing and no one anymore except Yazoo.

And Yazoo had everything and everyone, except Reno.

He snarled whenever Yazoo entered the apartment these days, stormed silently around the apartment with heavy strides as if he could burn it all down around them through sheer force of will, but never once did he lash out physically. Not after the bottle, not after Yazoo had responded with words he didn't want to hear. Wasn't ready to.

And so he stormed, and he sulked, and Yazoo grew, even as he watched. Small patches of individuality began to creep into his clothing, the way he carried himself, that he hadn't expressed before. Colors, sometimes, a leaf caught in his jacket or mud on his boots. Clothes. His hair was twisted back into a long waterfall of a braid one day, and Reno had to bite back a cuss when he saw it, for no good reason.

“Who are you trying to fool?” He asked. It came out a croak, and a furrow appeared between those white, slim brows that even now, while he stood trembling with nerves and something that tasted like but was not quite anger, he was distracted by thought of touching them, reassuring himself of Yazoo’s solidity with their texture and weight.

Yazoo looked at him, and it hurt to look back. So he didn't. Turned away and started towards the window, to at least have that escape, when fingers closed around his wrist. For a moment, he thought wildly of throwing his grasp off, reflex alone making him twist to look him in the eye again, but he fell still and silent as the grave he'd been racing towards with eyes wide open.

“Myself, maybe,” Yazoo said after a too long pause, with this strange expression that he thought was trying and failing to be a smile. Like he'd seen it in a movie once and was trying to recreate it. Except that he'd seen Yazoo smile before, when they'd-

Reno looked down at where Yazoo still had long, pale fingers curled around his wrist, just shy of touching his fingers. And, he realized with a lurch in his stomach, he wanted him to.

He yanked away, stumbling back to throw it behind him. “Sorry, pal,” he bit out with a grin twice as wide as Yazoo’s but no more honest, “don't remember inviting you to the pity party. Or at all. Who said you can keep coming back?”

That got a reaction, a pained twist to the mouth, and Reno felt a flush of victory before guilt followed fast on its heels. “You did,” Yazoo said simply, turning away for what Reno thought was the first time, lifting his arms to cup his elbows to his chest as he turned to pace.

“I'm sorry,” Reno drawled, retreating to old ruts worn into his voice, touching a hand to his temple, “I don't remember signing off on that. When exactly did I ever tell you I wanted you here?”

Many times, said Yazoo’s mouth, just as he was sure Reno’s himself did, but mercifully, he did not say that. Or, not that exactly. “You did.”

“Oh? And when was that, exactly?”

“When I was dead.”

That got Reno to halt in his tracks, wheels spinning as he stared. “You'll want to run that by me again,” he said slowly.

“I heard you,” Yazoo said, turning on his heel to trace the floorboards back and forth and back again. “Or. We did. The souls in the lifestream. You wanted-” He lifted his eyes to Reno’s, then away. “Closure. And… I suppose it was easy, for the planet. I never truly existed in the first place except as magic, and the planet emits that every day. It was needed. It was.”

“If you start telling me reverse hippy crap about how the planet felt my pain or something, I'm jumping right out that window.”

“Alright, then I won't.” Yazoo said. He didn't shrug, like most people would have, or smile, but he tilted his head in a way that always put him in mind of a bird, almost. Watchful. Taking him in.

And it drove him crazy.

Reno ground the heels of his palms into his eyes, hard. “Tell me something,” he said to the air.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Something real,” He said without thinking about it, and immediately regretted it, wished he could call it back, but it was said and done. The only thing he could do was ride it out or transfer it.

So he did.

Reached out and snagged Yazoo on his next circuit of the living room and brought him in for another kiss. It was harder than the last, more desperate, but Yazoo more than matched him for it. There was something in the grip of his slim hands as they came up to tangle in the sleeves of Reno’s rumpled dress shirt that spoke of fear and more than a few other things, but more than anything, neither wanted to let go.

Yazoo made a small noise into his mouth when one of Reno’s hands rose to fist in Yazoo’s hair, and Reno drank it down, replacing it with a hungry inhale that took everything and gave back everything he had. And quite a bit more.

Somebody’s knees hit the couch and they went over into it in a tumblr of arms and legs and bright hair, hands grabbing and pulling and pushing up shirts to drag nails up ribs until somebody, Yazoo, groaned.

Reno’s head was swimming, awash in feelings and sensations he'd long denied himself, but something was holding him back, made him hesitate when he saw the glassy haze of desire in Yazoo’s eyes when he bent to breathe down the length of Reno’s neck. “Wait.”

Yazoo went still, pulled his head up to tilt it at him like he hadn't quite heard him right. Even Reno didn't quite realize he'd said anything at first, or believed it, but he had and he was. His mouth fell. “Wait. We can't.”

Yazoo looked at him, flushed and panting, the faint traces of his almost smile fading, and Reno wished he hadn't said anything while also being glad he had, in a way that tore at his throat in the way out. “Why not?”

There were a thousand reasons why they should and only a few why not, and the one he picked was, “Not now. Not when you don't know if you hate me, or…” If I hate you.

 _I can't_ , was the unsaid words. _Not again._

Yazoo continued to stare, and Reno continued to wish he could bull it back like blood from a wound, but the words had been said and Yazoo was up and gone without a word, slamming the door behind him.

The apartment felt too big and too small without him, leaving Reno to curl around where he had been, eyes dry and burning, and wait. He didn't know what he was waiting for anymore, but he was sure he would find out along the way. 


End file.
